IMAGE: “Penguin Interviews,” from Frederick Cook’s Through the First Antarctic Night, 1896-1899, via Peter Smith, Food & Think.

Very good news: my former colleague at GOOD, Peter Smith, has joined the Smithsonian’s Food & Think blog as a regular contributor. Among his early posts is this one, on a highly effective scurvy prevention technique pioneered by Frederick Cook, an American surgeon and polar explorer.

Cook’s achievements have been overshadowed by his controversial claims to have been the first man to reach the North Pole as well as the first to climb Mt. McKinley. Nonetheless, as a member of the first expedition to spend an entire, dark winter icebound in the Antarctic, Cook’s innovations included recommending that the Belgica crew members sit in front of hot, bright fires to counteract the as-yet-unnamed Seasonal Affective Disorder, pioneering sled and tent designs, and the eating of penguins to ward off scurvy.

The latter was a trick that Cook had learned from the Inuit during his earlier expedition to the Arctic. While other Westerners had certainly noticed that the Inuit thrived despite their lack of access to antiscorbutics such as citrus fruits or cabbage, Cook was the first to realise that their secret lay in eating fresh meat, raw or lightly cooked, rather than the canned fish balls and sausage hashes with which the Belgica was provisioned.

Smith quotes a recent paper, “The Importance of Eating Local: Slaughter and Scurvy in Antarctic Cuisine” by Jason C. Anthony, on the taste of penguin, which Cook compared to “a piece of beef, odiferous cod fish and a canvas-backed duck roasted together in a pot, with blood and cod-liver oil for sauce.” On the other hand, Roald Amundsen, a fellow crew member, declared it “excellent,” but recommended the smaller fourteen-pound Adelie penguins over the much larger Emperor penguins, and warned that “you must ensure that all the fat is cut off the meat. It does not need to be treated with vinegar to make it taste good; you simply take the meat as it is and fry it in a pan with a knob of butter.”

Anthony’s paper contains many more fascinating details on penguin egg omelettes and penguin-fried seal steak, and is well worth a read. Meanwhile, Smith’s post explores the curious method the crew of the Belgica developed to hunt the poor birds: playing a tune on the ship’s cornet to lure them in, and then seizing them alive. The image this conjures up, of a sponge-gummed, half-mad sailor playing the cornet on an ice-bound boat in the dark, as penguins gather round solemnly to listen, is almost unbearably sad and strange.

Read Smith’s post in full to discover the musical preferences exhibited by the penguins, and keep an eye on his forthcoming contributions to Food & Think.

IMAGE: Damien Petit and his “Boîte A Pain,” photo by La Dépêche du Midi.

Both natives and non-natives alike tend to agree that bread is central to French cuisine, history, and national identity. Indeed, Steven Kaplan, a Cornell University professor who has spent the past forty years studying French society through its bread, argues that, historically, it was “impossible for the French to conceive of their well-being, here and now or hereafter, outside the confines imposed by the bread paradigm.”

Bread formed the base of the traditional French diet for centuries (Kaplan cites the Encyclopédie méthodique, which claims that, even if there are other foods available, “the bulk of the people believe they are dying of hunger if they do not have bread”), and the resulting “breadways” — the local boulangerie, national wheat policy, and a way of life structured around the daily production, purchase, and consumption of fresh bread — have shaped the French landscape, literally as well as psychologically, economically, and politically.

IMAGE: Steve Kaplan sniffing a baguette on the Conan O’Brien show (Kaplan dismissed Conan’s assertion that it “smells like bread” as “a tautology that non-believers are locked into,” claiming instead to detect winter vegetables, hazelnut, and butterscotch in his baguette).

The future of French bread is thus a matter of national concern, and the disappearance of more than 13,000 bakeries from towns and villages across the country over the last thirty years of the twentieth century signals, at least to the pessimistic, the rapid decline of a once glorious civilisation. Alarmed, the French government has legislated the composition of the baguette (in a 1993 ruling excluding preservatives), the definition of a bakery (bread must be made from scratch on the premises, no factory-frozen dough allowed), and even the timing of Parisian bakers’ August holidays, to ensure citizens are not stranded without bread.

IMAGE: A baguette vending machine in Paris, installed a year ago to allow the baker to go on holiday more often. Photo by Michel Euler/AP.

Nonetheless, French villages continue to lose their bakeries, and even their local “depôt de pain,” or general store to which the nearest baker would deliver fresh bread daily. According to Damien Petit, a baker in the southwestern French town of Gaillac, it is a given that opening a bakery in a small village is not profitable and that even door-to-door delivery to rural customers would operate at a loss. Instead, to capitalise on consumer demand in the breadless villages around Gaillac, Petit has come up with a P.O. Box for bread —  a dozen locked boxes, installed on the central square, which he fills with customer orders of bread, pastries, and even the local newspaper before 9:30 every morning, ready to be picked up at the key-holders’ convenience.

If bakeries can no longer be found in the villages, then bread must come to them, explains local journalist Patrice Scoccia, and this compromise between home delivery and a fixed shop might well be the way to do it. Petit installed his first boîte à pain in November, and has already set up two more in neighbouring Senouillac (population 1,047). “Si la mayonnaise prend,” adds Petit (a lovely French expression that roughly translates to “if it takes”), he can imagine expanding to isolated communities throughout the region — and perhaps sharing his breadboxes with libraries, chemists, and other businesses. The boxes could even become a meeting point for residents, in a civic life-enhancing combination of essential services and water-cooler gossip.

Borrowing the business model of the post-office box to give rural populations access to fresh, artisanal bread and fill in the gaps left by a profit-oriented food supply system is an ingenious idea (and undoubtedly already occurs elsewhere). It’s also a compelling example of the potential that de-anchoring services from the static cartography of a fixed storefront holds to reconfigure diet, public space, and the food system itself.

[NOTE: Thanks to Jim Chevalier for posting the "Boîte à Pain" story to the Association for the Study of Food and Society listserv.]

IMAGE: Adding mineral salts to tap water, photo by Martin Lersch, Khymos.

What this means, at least if you are a scientifically literate mineral water lover with a brand-new Sodastream machine, such as Martin Lersch of the blog Khymos, is that you can clone your own mineral water at home. Lersch reports that he has been enjoying his own bootleg San Pellegrino for a couple of weeks now, and it “tastes great!”

To make things even easier for would-be water pirates, Lersch has created a mineral water calculator — a handy downloadable spreadsheet into which you simply enter your tap water composition (optional, but recommended for best results; your water company should provide this upon request) and select your preferred mineral water, in order to generate a printable ingredients list of minerals and salts.

The advanced search allows you to tweak the recipe to exclude hard-to-source ingredients — apparently many are easily found on Amazon or at aquarium supply stores, but food grade sodium bromide (used in cloned Hathorn water) is “next to impossible to find” and aluminium silicate, which is used in glass manufacturing and cloned Badoît, is rather expensive.

IMAGE: My recipe for cloned San Benedetto water, generated by Martin Lersch’s mineral water calculator (Excel spreadsheet).

After acquiring your terroir by mail order, you then simply weigh and measure your ingredients, dissolve them in your tap water, and play around with your Sodastream in order to match the level of carbonation (and thus acidity). After just twenty minutes aging in bottle, your guests will be enjoying the citrusy top notes characteristic of Badoit, the pleasant mineral tang of Perrier, or the slight saltiness of Vichy — each the liquid equivalent of Dolly the sheep. High-end hotels may pride themselves on having a water sommelier and suggested pairings, but serving a flight of water clones will undoubtedly guarantee that you win your next dinner party.

IMAGE: Martin Lersch recommends letting your freshly cloned mineral water age for twenty minutes in the bottle, to allow the mineral salts to dissolve fully. Photo by Martin Lersch, Khymos.

[More water coverage on Edible Geography: The Water Menu and The Tastes of Drinking Water.]

IMAGE: Victoria Henshaw’s Sheffield smell walk, mapped.

Regular Edible Geography readers will know that smellscapes are a recurring subplot of this blog — a diversion that I justify on the basis that roughly ninety percent of what we perceive as taste is actually smell. For the most part, the built environment consists of accidental and overlooked odours — an unintentional backdrop of neighbourhood zoning laws, off-gassing cabinetry, scented cleaning products, and HVAC. Architecture, urban planning, and interior design operate primarily as visual practices, with little thought given to the auditory qualities of a space, and even less to olfactory experience. Nonetheless, smell can shape spatial perception at least as powerfully as light or sound, producing atmosphere, narrative, and even form.

Thus I was intrigued to see a brief mention on BLDGBLOG of a smell walk held in Sheffield last summer. It was led by Victoria Henshaw, a research associate in the University of Manchester’s Department of Architecture, whose recent doctoral work focused on the role of the sense of smell in urban environments. Although I was disappointed not to be able to join her to sniff Sheffield in person, Victoria kindly agreed to a phone interview, and the result was one of the most fascinating and wide-ranging conversations on smell and cities I’ve ever had.

In addition to describing her smellwalking methodology, Victoria discusses the olfactory impact of gentrification, the search for the stinkiest urine in England, and the importance of smellmarks in urban placemaking, as well as her new work on the sensory qualities of thermal experience and the intriguingly named National Vibration Project, and much more.

Designing at the sensory level means designing space, rather than just its enclosures — it involves the conscious consideration of invisible, relational, and dynamic information to augment or reshape the urban experience. Perhaps most excitingly, Victoria’s research on urban smellscapes is firmly tied to practical application — she is harnessing the transdisciplinary expertise of micro-climate experts, materials scientists, urban planners, and perfumers in order to develop standard sensory notation and profiles, as well as an inventory of design tools, that will help cities address the possibilities and challenges of an intentional olfactory architecture. An edited transcript of our conversation appears below.

Edible Geography: What goes into planning the route for a smell walk?

Victoria Henshaw: The funny thing with smell walks is that you can always find interesting places within a stone’s throw, wherever you are. I’ve done quite a few of them now — for my PhD, I did fifty-two smell walks in Doncaster, and since then I’ve done quite a few in a number of different cities, including one in Seattle in April. You find a starting point, and you know how much time you’ve got, and then it’s just about trying to find as much variation as possible within that time period.

Edible Geography: Do you scout it out first, or do you just set off and smell whatever you come across?

IMAGE: Henderson’s Relish factory, Sheffield, photo by Gregory Deryckère.

Henshaw: My preference is to visit the site beforehand, just so I can point people in the direction of interesting things and be a better guide.

With the Sheffield smell-walk, I knew I wanted one of the sites to be the Henderson’s Relish factory. It’s Worcester sauce’s main competitor in the UK. From the meeting point, I headed in that direction toward a nearby park that I thought it would be quite nice to include, and then I noticed that under some ordinary stairs that I’ve walked past a million times, there was this little bit that goes nowhere. I thought, “I wonder what’s down there, I’ll go and have a smell.” From above, it looked like one of those derelict spaces that you imagine homeless people would sleep in at night. It was actually very clean, apart from the fact that there were loads of cigarette ends.

IMAGE: The space under the stairs, Sheffield (photo by Victoria Henshaw).

In Seattle, I didn’t even choose the route. I just took people on the same walk that my co-organiser, Joyce Pisnanont, who works for the Seattle Chinatown International District Preservation & Development Authority, normally goes on — except that we did it from the perspective of smell, which gives you very different insights.

Something that I’ve found is that people usually do not register the smells around them. We’d walk through an area, and, because I was asking them to focus on smell, they would say things like, “You know, that smell is very familiar — I smell it every day and I really like it, but I’ve not consciously registered that it was there before — I’ve just whizzed past.”

People get into different perceptual states with smell, as they do for the other senses as well. Barry Truax has talked about this from the point of view of acoustic ecology: people get into different mindsets as to whether they’re going to actively perceive the sounds that are around them or not.

But what was also interesting is that, actually, whether they were actively registering odours or not, smells were still clearly influencing people’s perceptions of different places.

IMAGE: The smell-walkers in action, photo by Victoria Henshaw.

Edible Geography: Who comes on your smell walks?

Henshaw: The event in Sheffield was originally targeted at the Yorkshire Urban Design Group, so it was largely design professionals — urban designers, architects, town planners, and students in those fields. I organized the Seattle walk as part of the American Association of Geographers annual conference, and so, by its very nature, it was mostly geographers. But within my PhD research, I also did smell walks with local business people, residents, and people who worked in Doncaster town centre.

I also had access to a lot of data from sensory walks that had been carried out with residents of different cities across England, as part of a project called VivaCity 2020. They asked people to take photographs of their local area and then take the researcher on a ten-minute walk anywhere near where they lived. Afterward, the researcher went through each of the different senses and asked them, “How does your area look? How does your area taste? How does it sound?”

IMAGE: Doncaster smellmarks, photo by Victoria Henshaw.

Edible Geography: Have you found a difference in the kinds of things that the professional designers perceive on a smell walk, versus the residents?

Henshaw: It was quite striking how different people’s life perspectives, whether they be determined by gender or by race or by profession, all influenced the way that they perceived different odors.

Design professionals were thinking about smell in terms of managing the city. As an example, we’d often come across someone with a burger van, frying burgers and hot dogs in the street, within the heart of the town centre. The general community frequently really liked that — they’d say it reminded them of fairgrounds and good times.  Those with responsibility for managing the town centre thought it was a disgusting smell, that it really lowered the tone of the area, and that it should be banished.

IMAGE: Burger van, by Flickr user Evissa.

Now, something surprising that came out of my research is that when I asked people to rate their own sense of smell before the walk, the female participants rated their sense of smell much higher than the male participants did. But actually, when we went out there, men and women were detecting exactly the same thing.

The literature says that women do have a slightly better sense of smell, although it’s argued by some people that that’s related to female superiority at accessing the vocabulary to name the smells. However, I found that there was really no difference in gender performance when it came to detecting smells, but that the women showed a lot more disgust toward smells. My female participants would say things like, “That’s the smell of vomit, ugh, that’s making me feel sick.” Whereas the men were much more accepting of, and much less revolted by, things.

IMAGE: Street vomit, via.

Edible Geography: Is it possible that the women rated their sense of smell as better simply because their perceptual experience is stronger?

Henshaw: Absolutely. Before each walk, I asked everybody to explain their own rating of their sense of smell. In many cases, the men would explain that they thought they weren’t very sensitive to smell by saying things like, “It’s because if someone’s got body odour at the office, I don’t really notice it, but I know that Sheila, who’s at the next desk to me, she’s always saying how disgusting it is.”

Edible Geography: So they’re confusing detection and perception; just because they’re not disgusted by a smell doesn’t mean they’re not sensitive to it.

Henshaw: That’s right. I do occasional lessons in secondary schools with thirteen and fourteen year-olds and at that stage, I don’t find this difference in the self-assessment of odour performance between genders. It seems to be a socialisation of smell response that happens as people get older.

IMAGE: Sheffield panorama, photo by Flickr user meltonhill.

Edible Geography: I wonder whether that exaggerated perceptual response correlates to the idea that some places in cities aren’t safe for lone females. In other words, not being able to stand the smell of urine or vomit might be less about the quality of the odour and more about a sense of danger associated with alleys and the backs of buildings and so on.

Henshaw: Yes, absolutely. And what’s more, that association — between rundown places and spilt alcohol, urine, and vomit, or between private shopping centres and cleaning fluid, water, and coffee — held firm in people’s minds even when the actual place they were in didn’t smell like that at all. In the least liked places, people expected to be able to smell traffic fumes, and if they couldn’t detect them, they explained it away by saying the wind must be in the wrong direction.

One thing I found that was the same for professionals and members of the community was that the odours that people said they didn’t like before we set off, they often did like when they encountered that smell during the course of the walk.

IMAGE: Doncaster fish market, via Flickr user William Thomas.

There were a lot of people who said they didn’t like the smell of fish. But Doncaster is famous for its fish market, and when we went into the fish market on the walk, even those people who said that they didn’t like the smell of fish actually enjoyed it when they experienced it within the context of the market. They expected to smell fish there — it’s a fish market, so how else would it smell? — and it enhanced their experience of the market.

In a vacuum, people say that they like and don’t like particular smells, but it turns out that they can enjoy all kinds of odours as long as they experience them in the right context. As designers, that’s quite an important point for us to note. It would be easy for us to say that because our surveys have said that people like smell A but they don’t like that smell B, therefore we’re going to design out smell B and introduce smell A everywhere. But people can enjoy a smell that they say they don’t like when it enhances their place experience.

IMAGE: Sheffield’s iconic Tinsley cooling towers, photo by Flickr user underclassrising.

Edible Geography: That seems to imply that smells need to be traditional or expected to be enjoyed and to contribute to a person’s sense of place. What happens when a new smell is introduced into a city?

Henshaw: One good example of that comes from the Copley Road district, in Doncaster. Doncaster is traditionally a very working class town with very little racial mix. In the past five years, the Copley Road area specifically has seen a large influx of different ethnic minorities.

It was an interesting place to visit on my smell walks because there were the cooking odours of a lot of different ethnically-associated foods all within a small area — Thai food, Afghan cuisine, Turkish food, and so on.

IMAGE: Copley Road, Doncaster, via.

IMAGE: Sheffield balti house, photo by Flickr user Ashok.

Because this was quite a new thing to Doncaster, people came at it from two completely opposite ends of the spectrum. Some people really liked the smells and thought of them as a sign of Doncaster becoming a cosmopolitan city. Then there were a lot of people who experienced it almost as “these foreigners” polluting our traditional smellscape with their odours. Other research projects have come across this in the past — people will express racial antipathy through sensory means.

And some people expressed a kind of ambivalence toward the sensory stimuli, as if they were experiencing both responses at the same time. I did actually have some people say, “I really like this smell, it’s cosmopolitan and it’s a sign of Doncaster moving onward and upward, but it does have a feeling of being quite edgy here, and I could imagine that other people would feel threatened.” They’d talk about other people feeling threatened rather than themselves.

What’s interesting is that Copley Road’s international population is a relatively new phenomenon, whereas, for example, Manchester’s Chinatown is one of the largest and longest established in Europe. And in the sensory walk data sets from Manchester’s Chinatown, there was none of this sensory expression of racial antipathy. People said that they very much enjoyed the cooking odours — even local residents who said that the smells did become a bit strong at dinner time also admitted that they actually really liked them.

IMAGE: Manchester’s Chinatown, photo by Flickr user Emil Stefanov.

Edible Geography: I’m curious as to how you document these walks, if at all. Unlike audio or visual phenomena, smell can’t be photographed or recorded except by using prohibitively expensive headspace equipment. Given that smell is so evanescent and personal, do you create maps of your walks, or is it a purely in-the-moment experience?

Henshaw: For my PhD research, I recorded each of the interviews, and because they were each on a set route, it was easy to correlate mentions of smell to particular locations.

It’s perfectly possible to document smells with a map, although you run into some interesting challenges. One thing I ran into was how to document temporal odors. Most of my interviews were carried out during the daytime, and yet I found that people were mentioning the odours of the evening to me. They were describing the smellscape through recall rather reporting what they could detect while they were out there.

Then again, Doncaster market only operates on certain days of the week and at certain times during the day, and so sometimes we’d go to the market when it wasn’t operating and people would talk about the smell of emptiness.

Certainly, there were very clear temporal waves and shifts to the city’s smellscape. Actually, when I started the walks in January 2009, I’d originally planned to do the whole lot straight away. But I quickly realised that I needed to carry out some of the interviews in warmer weather, because there were huge differences in how people used public space based on the temperature, and that changed how the city smelled.

Across Europe, there are big differences in terms of how people use the outdoor area, depending on the general temperature. In Greece, for example, there are areas of public space that people are much more likely to use in the autumn than they are during the summer when it’s just too hot. There’s a different seasonality to the smellscape, as it were.

IMAGE: Doncaster smellmarks, photos by Victoria Henshaw.

Edible Geography: I’m reminded of the smell-mapping work of Sissel Tolaas, and her idea that smell is a navigational tool. Your idea of smellmarks also seems to imply that smell goes beyond augmenting place experience to communicate with and orient people.

Henshaw: The idea of a smellmark obviously comes from the idea of a landmark, and the idea that a distinctive, recurring or constant smell can act as a geographic reference point.

In soundscapes research, there’s been some discussion about identifying soundmarks. One example would be a church bell. The idea used to be that wherever you could hear the church bell, that was the community that church served. So that soundmark marked time and communicated certain events, but also delimited a physical, geographical space as well.

In the same way, I found that there were certain smells in Doncaster that people would bring up again and again and again. The fish market was one example. Another was this one particular basement restaurant in Doncaster that has a vent that releases directly onto the street from their kitchen. It’s really, really strong and you can feel the warmth of the emission as well. People talked about that quite a lot: before we actually went out walking, while we were walking, and afterward. And some people didn’t like the smell, and others really liked it, but either way, you could blindfold people and they’d know where they were if they could smell that restaurant.

IMAGE: The Shambles, York; a well-preserved British medieval streetscape, via.

Some smellmarks were big enough to leak out of their context. For example, there’s a medieval part of town that smells of the drains all the time because it’s got such old drainage infrastructure. It really smells terrible, but it’s highly associated with that area. When it leaks out into different areas, people would detect it and say things like “I’m not sure I like that smell,” and then they’d realize it was the medieval area and then it wouldn’t be so bad, because it was in context.

One other interesting example of a smellmark was the Lush bath and body stores. They have a very strong smell, and more than a third of my smell walk participants brought them up spontaneously as a smell reference point. I also interviewed the manager of a Lush store and he said that whenever he goes to a different town, he gets off the train and he can pretty much follow his nose to the Lush store. He doesn’t need a map because he can smell it.

IMAGE: Lush soaps, via.

Edible Geography: Moving on from this smell-walk research to the bigger picture of the relationship between smell and cities, how is smell used in urban design? And how could or should it be used?

Henshaw: At the moment, the smell of cities is mostly an unintentional consequence of other planning decisions.

There’s a fairly recent book called Invisible Architecture, and in it, the architect Herve Ellena says that olfaction is “the dark side of architecture” — it’s the sense that people don’t think about and, as a result, the smells of architecture and of designed interior spaces come about as an unforeseen consequence.

The same is true, I’ve found, for the outdoor environment and the smell of cities. We never thought about the smells of places. We develop these huge swathes of land, and we’re removing meaningful smells and sounds and textures without even being aware of them in the first place. In the UK, we have something called listed building status, so that beautiful buildings are protected and we’re not allowed to redevelop them. But there aren’t those equivalents for beautiful sounds or beautiful smells. That makes it doubly important that designers and planners consider smell and the other senses.

IMAGE: Smellmark signage? via Glass Petal Smoke.

In terms of actively using smell in urban design, there are strong ethical implications that I take quite seriously. What I don’t want to do is advocate for people to introduce loads of synthetic scents into public spaces, or to parachute in odours that have absolutely nothing to do with that area. At the very least, there are people’s environmental sensitivities to be considered.

When I talk to architects and planners, I tell them that there are other ways of doing this. People think that if you’re talking about designing with smell that must mean introducing synthetic odours. But when I ask people on smell walks what sort of things are influencing their smell experience, they talk about wind movement or the way water makes an area’s air quality seem better.

Typically, design professionals in the West think about the smell environment in terms of control and management: separation, deodorization, masking, and scenting. Really, though, the way we in Western society organise odours is through separation, which stems from Modernism.

IMAGE: China’s deodorant guns pump out fragrance to cover up the smell of landfill; photo via PopSci.

Edible Geography: What are some of the tools that designers have to work with smell? How would someone look at their masterplan for say, the Olympic site in East London, and do a smell audit of it?

Henshaw: One thing I did as part of my PhD thesis was that I identified different urban design decision-making processes where the sense of smell could be incorporated in. The first one of those is around legislation and policy — the sorts of frameworks within which built environment professionals operate. There are places within that where odour would fit — for example, there’s already legislation that sets noise limits — but it’s considered in negative terms and in terms of managing a potential nuisance.

IMAGE: Overflowing rubbish bins in Leeds; photo via The Guardian.

In talking to developers, designers, and architects about where they thought that smell would best fit into the planning and building process, they felt that smell could and should be incorporated into design statements. In other words, when we produce design guidance documents within cities, they should have a clear statement of what position a local area and local communities have on the issue of smell — which could be as basic as just saying that they want odour to be considered as part of any pre-design assessment.

Now, because people can perceive odours in very different ways, this is quite a sensitive area. Certain community groups and ethnic groups, or even different genders, can feel excluded on the basis of odour. So it’s quite important that different sectors of the community be involved in assessing a site and determining whether its smells are meaningful to them. Designers can work with that input, and use the tools at their disposal — the materials used, enclosure and air movement, or the introduction of water — to create a smellscape that enhances people’s sense of place.

Some of the tools at an urban smell designer’s disposal are very down-to-earth everyday things that turn out to be quite powerful. For example, where bus stops are located is an important olfactory decision. If they are right next to large residential blocks, under people’s windows, then although there are the benefits of close access to public transport, it means that people have to keep their windows closed, particularly during the warm summer months when the fumes are especially strong.

IMAGE: Sheffield traffic, photo by Flickr user Sarah Grice.

Designers who are sensitive to that can balance the importance of convenient access to public transport with the olfactory impact, and perhaps locate the bus stop outside, for example, a next-door business instead. Another issue is traffic lights on hills: cars and lorries that set off up the hill from a stop emit far more smell and fumes right where people are waiting to cross the street than they would if the traffic lights were located a little bit further up the road where it was flatter, for example.

Edible Geography: The interesting issue there is that you have contesting priorities: easy access to public transport, convenient pedestrian crossings, or improved traffic circulation are set against optimizing the smellscape. This also happens with urban trees, which are chosen to be easy to manage, but then turn out to provoke terrible asthma, for example.

Henshaw: Exactly. I used to be a town centre manager, actually, and it used to really frustrate me that the people who managed the CCTV cameras didn’t want us to have trees with decent-sized canopies because it blocked their sightlines, even though with climate change, providing urban shade is increasingly important, even in the UK.

IMAGE: Fallen leaves on a Sheffield street, photo by Flickr user Girard Alexandre.

Edible Geography: Have you come across any particularly good examples of smell design in urban planning?

Henshaw: Well, in most cases, sadly, smell tends to be thought about as a consequence rather than a design objective. I think the most interesting example I’ve come across of a consciously designed urban smellscape is in Grasse, in the south of France, which is the perfume production centre of the world. Most of the jasmine for Chanel No.5 is grown in that area. And, because Grasse already has a reputation built on its smellscape, they have then tried to use urban design to emphasize that. So rather than the visual sense taking priority in the way that it does in the design of most places today, they use visual imagery to complement the existing smellscape, by using images of flowers and perfume in their public art and their sculptures. It is a bit on the tacky side, but they’ve even got a fountain at the centre of the roundabout outside their Hotel de Ville, and in the center of it they’ve got a big bottle of Chanel No.5. They’ve actually got a real perfume fountain as well, outside one of the perfume houses.

IMAGE: Floral and perfume-themed decor in Grasse, photos by Victoria Henshaw.

IMAGE: Perfumed fountain, Grasse, photos by Victoria Henshaw.

In any case, it is evidently something that they’ve thought about in all sorts of different ways. The town centre is like many areas in France — it’s got the traditional canyon-type footprint with tall old stone buildings and a very slim street that the traffic travels through, abutted either side by restaurants, and outside each of those they have big pots of jasmine growing. Even though you’ve got the traffic, you’re smelling the scent of the flowers, and they do absorb the sound that comes with the canyon effect as well.

IMAGE: Grasse, photos by Victoria Henshaw.

Edible Geography: Some of what Grasse is doing is almost smell design in reverse: they’re providing visual context for a background scent that is leaking in from the surrounding countryside, to help people appreciate the smell and enhance their sense of place.

The other thing I was curious about is, given the headlines about China building new cities from scratch or Arup designing an eco-cities in South Korea, whether you’ve encountered any designers working on those kinds of projects who are consciously designing urban smell experiences?

Henshaw: I haven’t, but it is an interesting question. You’d think that if they were trying to fundamentally rethink the city to make it more sustainable, they’d expand the way they think about design to include sensory experience as well. Instead, what they’ve tended to think about is changes in lifestyle — things like having better connected cities with more public transport, pedestrian friendly environments, and local food, as well as more environmentally friendly building materials and building design. But the question of what design is — what it encompasses and what sensory experiences it should consider — aren’t being reconsidered at a foundational level.

IMAGE: Car exhaust.

Edible Geography: And yet, of course, taking cars off the street will have an olfactory and an auditory effect. The lifestyle and environmental implications of these design decisions are important, but perhaps they shouldn’t exclude consideration of the sensory experience implications.

Henshaw: Exactly. Actually, I went to a conference in Manchester a couple of weeks ago on city weather. I went along because my research showed how significantly weather can influence smell experiences: how air moves around a city, how odours evaporate in different temperatures, how each season brings different behaviors and activities, how temperature inversions can trap smog — even how rain can both clean the air but also release drain smells, as well. But actually, the people who spoke at the conference were very much numbers-based — it was all about climate change and urban heat islands and extreme weather events and so on. It seems that within urban design and built environment practices in general, there are various movements that are looking at all sorts of things that relate to the sensory environment, but they’re not making that connection.

IMAGE: Sheffield storm drain, by Flickr user Tim Herrick.

The local food movement and gentrification is interesting in that regard, as well. Many of the breweries and food factories that were traditional smellmarks have now been designed out of cities. Breweries were a traditional urban industry in England, and we have brands that are associated with all the major cities — Boddingtons in Manchester, Tetley’s in Leeds, and Wards in Sheffield, and so on. All of them have now been relocated out of the cities — Tetley’s was the last one and that closed last summer. And that’s had a huge impact on the smell of those cities.

Edible Geography: The same thing is true in the eastern US. Before Prohibition there were more breweries in New York City than there are Starbucks today. They’ve all moved out of the city and the breweries have been converted to fancy lofts for the creative class — but what’s interesting is that artisanal brewers and distillers are now moving back into urban centres again, and they have their own effect on the smellscape.

Of course, as industry moved out of the city, people remember the breweries and the sweet factories nostalgically, but there were also the slaughterhouses and tanneries and meat-packing districts, and people don’t miss those smells so much.

IMAGE: The Cream of Manchester is no longer made at the urban Strangeways brewery, photo via.

Henshaw: In Invisible Architecture, Barbara and Perliss do an interview in New York City’s meat-packing district, and it’s fascinating to hear how much the sensory environment has changed.

Edible Geography: It’s interesting, because designers and urban planners spend a lot of time thinking and talking about gentrification, but you don’t often come across a sensory analysis of it.

Henshaw: And that’s something that smell can communicate very strongly indeed: the sense of whether you belong in a place or not. It was something that was really clear from the responses people gave to the smells of Doncaster’s Copley Road area, and it’s something that different academics have written about in the past: that feeling that you don’t belong somewhere is something that you pick up on in very sensory terms.

There was a very interesting thing that I’ve read about that’s happened in the States, but doesn’t seem to have hit England yet, which is people from the transient community being excluded from public libraries and community centres because of the way that they smell. In terms of body odour, people are far less tolerant than they have been historically, and it’s the same with towns and cities. I think that’s something that designers have to be really careful about, because they may be using smell, even unconsciously, to exclude people.

Edible Geography: This brings us back to the ethical implications of smell design and another issue I wanted to ask you about, which was private businesses using smell to encourage certain behaviours. The most recent example I read about was a supermarket in Staten Island that was pumping out the smell of “Lindt Chocolate,” “Rosemary Focaccia,” and “Smoky Bacon,” and had seen fresh food sales go up by eight percent. And I remember reading about a new casino development in Vegas, CityCenter, that had a custom fragrance called “Essence of Destiny” pumped into its ventilation system. That world of privatised smellscapes doesn’t seem to be regulated at all — should it be?

Henshaw: A lot of people on my smell walks raise the topic of sensory manipulation. For example, it’s been reported quite widely in the media that supermarkets will pipe the smell of baking bread through ventilation systems to entice in shoppers and increase sales. And my smell walk participants frequently brought up the idea that they thought shops were trying to trick them into buying things by using different smells, and they really didn’t like the idea of it at all.

There were a couple of things that were interesting about this. One was that people drew the line between smells they thought were honest and smells they thought were dishonest in different places. A lot of people liked the scent of the high-end clothing store, but they resented the supermarket bakery smell, so perhaps it tied back to preconceived ideas about the big bad supermarket manipulating people whereas the small independent stores were thought of in much more positive terms.

IMAGES: Examples of scenting in urban design, including the awesomely named Vanilla Ice skating rink developed by Givaudan for the Eiffel Tower in 2004. Photo collage by Victoria Henshaw.

And then some of the discomfort comes down to how people think about the sense of smell. As far back as the 1800s, vision and sound became thought of as “the noble senses,” and became more highly regarded by society than smell, touch, and taste, which were called “the chemical senses.” At the same time, the sense of smell began to be associated with women, children, older people, and ethnic minorities, as well, and it was tied up with the whole idea of witchcraft.  I think that association between smell and witchcraft has lingered on in the ways people think about smell today, and the power they attribute to it to affect their behaviour without their being able to control it.

That level of suspicion, fear, and lack of control means that people think about designing with smell in a different way than they would think about design in general terms.

Edible Geography: That’s interesting, because then it’s partly a question of people just not being smell educated. It’s smell ignorance — a lack of confidence in your own ability to perceive and understand smell — that makes you fearful that you’re being manipulated in some way.

Henshaw: I like that phrase, “smell ignorance!” Also, at the end of the day, the trendiness of smell design in the service sectors and product sectors over the past few years, with the likes of Martin Lindstrom and his Brandscapes work, just serves to highlight how smell hasn’t really been thought about in the urban design world to the same extent at all.

Edible Geography: Where is your smell research going, and what are you working on now?

Henshaw: I’m definitely at the point where I want to take the knowledge I’ve gained through my research and think about ways we as designers can do something with it. I’m working with Ray Lucas at the University of Manchester, and he’s done quite a lot on sensory notation systems, for example. The most interesting question for me now is: how do we as designers go about assessing the sensory experience of sites and proactively designing to preserve and enhance that.

My wider interest now is to start considering how the senses interact — how, for example, sound influences our sense of smell, and they combine to affect how we perceive different environments. Outdoor, urban environments are my particular interest, but I’m also interested in thinking about how outdoor and indoor environments interact.

At Manchester, I’ve joined a project that is just getting started, looking at how older people sense and regulate their thermal environment. It’s partly funded by one of the big utility companies, Electricité de France, which is particularly interested in how older people understand new thermal regulation technologies. But I’ve been brought in to look at it from a sensory perspective, in terms of how the senses interact to produce that feeling of being hot or cold — the staleness of the air contributes to a feeling of uncomfortable warmth, for example. My idea is that thermal comfort is a multi-sensory phenomenon, not just a matter of the temperature on the thermostat.

IMAGE: The University of Manchester’s Conditioning Demand research initiative.

I’ve also been working on something called the National Vibration Project [PDF], which is investigating how vibration annoys people in homes. The idea is to look at all different sorts of vibration, whether it be from construction, or adjacent motorways, or underground subway systems, and see whether people are annoyed and what factors influence their annoyance.

One of the things we found with that is that if you see your ornaments vibrating on a mantelpiece, you’re far more likely to be annoyed by the vibration than you are if you just felt it. Somehow experiencing it through that additional sensory means makes it much more annoying. And vibration is by its very nature felt through multiple sensory means: it’s sound that you feel in a tactile way.

In fact, this is something that people don’t usually realize, but the experience of smell is also inherently multi-sensory. It’s experienced not just through our olfactory receptors, but also through our trigeminal nerve, which is a tactile nerve in our faces. I’m writing something about it myself, because it’s barely been discussed in the sensory literature. With odours like petrol and nail varnish remover and paint, you get a tingly sensation in your face — and that’s your trigeminal nerve sensing that smell. Smells like cinnamon, petrol, and acetone produce a lot of trigeminal sensation.

Interestingly, we’re less likely to like trigeminal smells than any other kind of smell — it’s the only inbuilt shared smell preference humans have. In the sixties and seventies, scientists wafted swabs of trigeminally-associated smells in front of babies, and they all pulled horrible faces of disgust. In adults, disgust is a social, learned response, but it’s also a physical reaction — we pull a particular face to try to limit the amount of air that we let into our bodies through our noses.

IMAGE: Disgust face, via.

Edible Geography: So the experience of cinnamon is always both tactile and olfactory. But it seems as though a lot of urban sensory experience is inherently multi-sensory. I’m reminded of your smellmark restaurant vent, or architectural historian David Gissen’s exploration of dankness or dust, which are visual, olfactory, and tactile environments, and can even muffle or distort sound.

Henshaw: When I started my research, I was actually really uncomfortable about trying to separate smell from sensory experience. Clearly, we experience cities through the interaction of all of our senses, and in any case, the five senses are a social creation — different cultures divide the senses up in different ways. But actually, we know so little about the sense of smell that you almost have to focus just on that and try to build up a body of knowledge to work from.

Even within my smell research, though, I couldn’t help but encounter overlaps. For example, we were talking about the medieval area of Doncaster and how it smells pretty bad due to the drains — and, in fact, the sound environment was usually experienced as quite negative, because it’s got that medieval canyon footprint that amplifies the sound of traffic. But the visual aesthetic of the beautiful old buildings more than made up for the olfactory and auditory negatives, and the place is quite liked. The combination and variety between the sensory experiences actually seems to heighten people’s enjoyment of place.

IMAGE: List of smells detected in English towns and cities by participants in Victoria Henshaw’s smell-walking studies.

There was a very interesting study done by a couple of academics, Dann and Jacobsen, who examined any mention of the smell of different places in the descriptions of independent travel writers, all the way back to the 1800s. They found all sorts of interesting trends, including the fact that towns were consistently talked about in much more negative terms than rural areas, but their conclusion was that cities should really try to design out all the negatively perceived smells and should reintroduce more positively perceived smells.

Now, my issues with that recommendation would be, first of all, different people’s ideas of unpleasant smells vary quite dramatically, so if you’re just designing based on the smell preferences of a particular group of people with more powerful voices, then you could end up with a highly exclusive environment. And, as the example of Doncaster’s medieval area shows, a smell that would be negatively perceived in isolation can actually contribute to a positive place experience.

As designers, I think it’s really important to note that not all aspects of sensory perception in an area have to be positive. That’s actually something I’d be interested in doing in the future: developing a guide to different sorts of areas and the different sensory profiles they can have. That’s something that could be both used to manage and understand existing areas, but also as developers work on new developments, they could be conscious of the sensory profile that is best suited to the kind of place experience they’re trying to create.

The idea of a sensory profile would also give you a nice framework for interdisciplinary thinking. There’s a real need now for all the disciplines — acousticians, urban planners, perfumers, and micro-meteorologists — to start thinking in cross-cutting ways to pull this all together. Most designers don’t have time to dig into all the research, they just need tools that are going to make it easy for them to consider these issues in their day-to-day practice.

IMAGE: Dale Air are the official aroma suppliers to Jorvik Viking Centre, who offer the following testimonial: “Our relationship with Dale Air, from the beginning, has made the smell experience at Jorvik one of the most unique memories for the Jorvik visitor.”

Edible Geography: And, of course, negatively perceived smells have their own historical value and future uses. I like the idea of smell preservation and smell tourism — the idea that smell reconstruction can be an important aspect of visiting a historic site, for example. There’s an extremely interesting example of Jorge Otero-Pailos attempting to recreate the smell of Philip Johnson’s Glass House at different points during its inhabitation. A better known, if far cheesier, example is Jorvik Viking Centre, which I think every kid in England visits at some point or another. The overwhelming experience there is how bad it smells — it’s a smell recreation as a historical experience.

IMAGE: Urine samples being donated at Thorpe Park, via.

Henshaw: Thorpe Park introduced a new visitor attraction based on The Saw last year, and they did a huge search for the smelliest urine in England. They’ve recreated it and used it in the ride to enhance the experience of horror. The funny thing about that is that it’s an experience that people pay a lot of money for.

The idea of smell preservation also reminds me of what’s happened to the traditional English pub. Now that tobacco legislation has moved all the smokers outside, pubs have started to smell of body odour, urine, stale beer — all those sorts of things, instead. A lot of people on my smell walks really mourned the smell of the traditional English pub. Smoke was a large part of it, but really all those odours combined together to create this unique mix — the smell of the English pub — which people perceived as a comforting odour. And now it’s gone. It’s not that people don’t perceive the health benefits, but they do miss that smell.

What was interesting was that a lot of my smell walkers talked to me about how they are actually more annoyed now by experiencing cigarette smoke in the street than they were by it in the pubs, because in the pubs it was expected to be in there and it belonged, and they don’t think it belongs in the street in the same way. That seems to be part of the current mindset: we’ve sanitized our urban environments to such a degree that any experience that’s out of our control, we automatically react negatively to it.

IMAGE: Cigarette butts in Sheffield, photo by Flickr user Philippa Willitts.

Edible Geography: The relationship between cigarettes and pubs also illustrates an interesting property of smell, which is that you carry it with you, even after leaving a place. As a non-smoker, I quite liked the smell of cigarette smoke in pubs, but I hated that when I got home, my hair and my clothes stank.

Henshaw: That’s true. One of the unexpected effects of the smoking legislation is that the English dry-cleaning industry really took a massive hit!

[Many thanks to Victoria Henshaw for this inspiring conversation. More smell coverage on Edible Geography: "The Scent of Climate Change," "Talking Nose," "Ginger Biscuits and Deodorant Guns," and "You Are Here."]

IMAGE: Six bruises, six cakes; art and photo by Victoria Yee-Howe.

In addition to pyramid-power jellies and pie pops, Yee-Howe made six bruise cakes, each topped with a different hematomatic record of blunt trauma past. “I have always taken photos of different cuts or scrapes I have had, accidental or consensual or whatever,” she explained to PBS’s Art: 21 blog. For this project, Yee-Howe created photo transfers (images printed on rice paper with edible ink) of bruises caused by six past lovers, mining her photographic archive to share her skin’s ephemeral records of damage in equally fleeting form.

IMAGE: Cake ruin; art and photo by Victoria Yee-Howe.

The bruises are impressive (I speak as someone who is never without one due to a combination of vascular genetics and lack of coordination); the layer cake (strawberry-puree batter layers sandwiched with blueberry jam, based on the classic Southern Pink Lady recipe) equally so. Combined, they foreground the relationship between a body and the food it consumes, hinting uncomfortably at the delayed legacies of today’s indulgences and the blurred line between pleasure and pain.

IMAGE: Cake slicing at its most violent; art and photo by Victoria Yee-Howe.

A purple-black bruise blooming on the frosted surface of a perfect pink layer cake is perhaps the ideal embodiment of domesticity’s violent subcurrents, from sexist stereotypes and inadvertent emotional manipulation to outright physical abuse. Yee-Howe exploits that ambiguity (were these bruises accidental, consensual, or “whatever”?), explaining that her delicious and disturbing cakes aim to “play with people’s conceptions of what is desirable and edible and maybe even make them a little uncomfortable with their hunger.”

IMAGE: Stick a fork in it; art and photo by Victoria Yee-Howe.

Thanks to Rocio for the Art:21 link. For more on the cultural freight of cake, see Doom Cakes.

* “Senses, an interactive multimedia prix fixe evening” of “total engagement, stimulation, satisfaction, and sense submission” takes place at 8pm on December 29 at Arabica Lounge — I’d love to hear about it if you go.

The idea of canonising art whose very nature is fleeting is compelling, in a quixotic kind of way. Meanwhile, the works themselves are understated and charming, yet illustrate the seemingly infinite potential to see the world slightly askew that is offered to each of us afresh every moment.

IMAGE: 2010 winner, Treebute to Yogya, by Sara Nuytemans and Arya Pandjalu, took the form of a performance in which a bike gang drove through the city of Yogyakarta wearing helmets filled with soil and planted with a tree.

IMAGE: 2009 winner In den Zilltertaler Alpen, in which the artist Hank Schmidt in der Beek “stands in the manner of a plein air painter surrounded by mountain scenery and paints the pattern of his shirt on canvas.” Photo by Fabian Schubert.

IMAGE: Berndnaut Smilde, Nimbus, “a wonderful and well-composed cloud in a room” and a 2010 finalist.

This year’s winner, Slovakian artist Jaroslav Kyša, was recognised for his urban intervention, The Barrier, which used food to form a flock of pigeons into a temporary, living barrier in front of a branch of Primark, in London.

As Americans gear up for the annual Black Friday festival of shopping that has all but overshadowed turkey and pumpkin pie as the central focus of the Thanksgiving holiday, there is something wonderfully unsettling about watching London’s bargain-hunters have to force their way through an equally single-minded, jostling mass of winged vermin.

IMAGE: Jaroslav Kyša, The Barrier

Kyša’s work reminded me of Robert Sullivan’s excellent book, Rats, which examines another of the city’s least welcome inhabitants as man’s “mirror species” — a parallel universe through which to understand those aspects of human nature, history, and urban environments that are more comfortably overlooked.

City rats live on rubbish — the food we discard — and thus their habitats form a kind of inverted guide to the city’s edible landscape: a map of all the food we don’t eat. According to Sullivan,

Some of the health department rodent-control field-workers say that a severe rat infestation depends on at least one good chicken place in a neighbourhood; people buy chicken, take it out, and leave trails of chewed wings and bits of breasts.

Indeed, although people commonly believe the entire subway system is full of rats, Sullivan is at pains to point out that “rats are not everywhere in the system; they live in subways according to the supply of discarded human food and sewer leaks.” Sewers themselves, the final loop in the city’s digestive system, helped today’s ubiquitous brown rat colonise the city — before their development, brown rats preferred to live in burrows on farms.

IMAGE: Sewer rats!

In his chapter titled “Food,” Sullivan describes the pioneering work of Martin W. Schein, who was the first to scientifically show a positive correlation between the number of rats and the amount of garbage, using Baltimore as a test case. Schein apparently hoped “one day to be able to predict the number of rats in an area from pounds of refuse,” but moved onto studying turkeys before achieving this goal.

However, his findings did include a list of rat dietary preferences and dislikes. Under the heading “Garbage Rats Liked,” we find scrambled eggs, macaroni and cheese, corned beef hash, fried chicken, and white bread — all currently enjoying a renaissance due to the popularity of nursery-nostalgic comfort food. Conversely, “Garbage Rats Didn’t Like As Much” could just as easily describe the contents of a salad bar: beets, celery, cauliflower, cabbage, and carrots.

IMAGE: Rat buffet.

In a fascinating side-note, post-Schein studies have shown that rats also develop a “local food dialect,” or an appreciation of the ethnic foods of the neighbourhood in which they live. For example, though Schein reported that rats preferred sweet to spicy foods, an exterminator in East Harlem told Sullivan that “the rats there have learned to enjoy spicy garbage.”

The larger point, however, is that food — its consumption, excretion, and disposal within the city — has, unintentionally, for the most part, shaped the urban pestscape. As exterminator mogul Barry Beck tells Sullivan, “They design buildings to support pigeons and for infiltration by rodents because they don’t think about it.”

IMAGE: Jaroslav Kyša, The Barrier

Beck dreams of a day when he will be brought in at the planning stage, to analyse weaknesses and “build out pests without pesticides.” Meanwhile, Jaroslav Kyša’s Barrier is a more tangible reminder that food is a powerful force for cross-species urban design — but, also, that the unwanted animals that live alongside us have much to tell us about our cities and ourselves.

IMAGE: The Metro Wine Map of France, designed by David Gissen.

David Gissen is usually known as an architectural theorist whose publications (including a blog, and Subnature, a book I highly recommend) explore peripheral, denigrated, or otherwise overlooked aspects of urban nature — puddles, smog, and weeds — in order to re-imagine the relationship between buildings, cities, and the environment.

IMAGE: “Reconstruction of Midtown Manhattan c.1975,” and “Urban Ice Core/Indoor Air Archive,” two speculative proposals by David Gissen that reconstruct New York City as the world centre for intense indoor air-production and consider how that atmosphere might be archived.

In Gissen’s own projects, he proposes a new kind of architectural preservation and reconstruction that engages with the intangibles of the urban environment. For example, his “Reconstruction of Midtown Manhattan c. 1975″ (pdf) removes the architectural shells of individual skyscrapers to show the city as a collective monolith of manufactured atmosphere, and his most recent installation, “Museums of the City” (currently on display at the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno, as part of the Landscape Futures exhibition), visualises the application of a museum’s indoor language of display — vitrines, frames, plinths, and lighting — to the city itself.

IMAGE: From “Museums of the City” by David Gissen, project rendered by Victor Hadjikyriacou.

Earlier this year, however, Gissen the architectural theorist assumed a new identity: Gissen the wine nerd. In mid-January, he started to tweet about his adventures in French wine under the handle @100aocs, and quickly gained a following of sommeliers, importers, and winemakers who enjoy his unusual perspective on their field. Last week, he unveiled the first fruit of his months of tasting: The Metro Wine Map of France, which re-draws the country’s wine appellations as stops on a regional subway line.

I caught up with David by phone to talk about what this shift in cartographic aesthetic can reveal about the geography of wine. Our conversation, below, ranges from the dominance of Riedel glasses, the use of concrete in wine-making, and the best subway stop from which to embark on your own journey of wine exploration.

•••

Edible Geography: What originally inspired you to drink your way through one hundred different appellations?

David Gissen: Like a lot of people that get obsessive about wine, I had an experience. It sounds like a religious kind of thing, but it’s true. I was at Chez Panisse and our server suggested that we have a particular bottle of wine. I hadn’t heard of it, but, as I found out afterward, it was one of the most famous bottles by one of the most famous winemakers in France. It was a 2009 Morgon by Marcel Lapierre, who is considered one of the founding fathers of the natural wine movement in France, and it was his last vintage before he died.

IMAGE: The 2009 Morgon by Marcel Lapierre, photo via.

I didn’t know any of that when I drank this wine, but it tasted like nothing I’d ever had before. As many people have said about their first wine experience, I was tasting ideas.

I’d previously had experiences like that with art, which I became obsessive about, as well as with architecture, the history of cities, and with certain kinds of geographical ideas, and then I had it with wine.

After that bottle, I wanted to learn more about wine, but I didn’t want to take a course. Instead, I thought that if I had a methodological framework for exploring wine and I shared it on Twitter, people would begin to be able to suggest things for me to try, and I would begin to assemble a course that responded to what I wanted to know, which was how a wine like that Morgon came about, how it was related to other wines, and what other wines were like it — in other words, what other wines are concerted expressions of particular philosophies or places.

IMAGE: David’s tasting notes are stored on a Google Map.

Edible Geography: Within this framework of exploration, did you also already know you were going to keep your tasting notes on a map?

David Gissen: Yes — I thought a map would be the best way to start to understand the way that certain wines taste like they are from certain places. I recently finished Reading Between the Wines by Terry Theise, and he says that to learn wine you need a system. What he recommends is trying every Chardonnay or Cabernet Sauvignon you can lay your hands on, from anywhere in the world. I wanted to get a geographic sense of French wine, and I think my system worked well for that.

The Morgon was the initial inspiration, but the other thing is that I was on sabbatical from my teaching job at California College of the Arts this spring, working on a book and working on my installation for the Landscape Futures exhibition, and I needed a system to relax. I’m something of a workaholic, and I knew I needed a system for my hobby if I was actually going to take time off work to do it. So, every other day — well, some weeks, every day — I would get a bottle from a new appellation and try it with my wife or with friends.

IMAGE: Detail from The Metro Wine Map of France, designed by David Gissen.

Edible Geography: I followed your tasting journey vicariously on Twitter this spring, as you began to understand what “northern” or “southern” in a region might taste like. When did your Google map become a Metro map?

Gissen: I had been learning about French wine for about six or seven months, and it was the most intense, frustrating experience. A lot of people in the industry would tell me that to learn about the wines of France, you have to get to know the people who make them. The thing was, I had to budget carefully just to learn some basic geographic principles in French wine. I certainly don’t have the budget to traipse around France and meet with French winemakers for nine months. You can do that if you’re an importer, I suppose, but it seemed completely ridiculous for me to do.

On top of that, I was just very frustrated with the fact that some basic ideas about the relationships between wine and geography that seemed so simple to me, after my own tastings, were not actually expressed simply anywhere. Part of the problem is the way the geographical description of French wine relies on a very literal languages of maps. What I mean by that is that if you look at almost any book on French wine, the maps look like the kind of thing that an explorer would use. They’re extremely literal, cartographic views, so that all the regions are drawn with very precise jagged-line boundaries, and you’re supposed to understand that this particular terroir stops just below this particular Autoroute in France, for example, and so on.

IMAGE: A typical map of French wine regions.

My feeling was that you could explain some very basic geographical ideas and principles about French wine if you used a visual language that was relational and condensed. To me, that means the language of the subway map. If you know the history of the Tube map, you know that this method of drawing abstracted London, and abandoned certain kinds of complexities of geography, in order to express more simple ideas about how stations were positioned in relation to each other and how different places within the system were interconnected.

IMAGE: Harry Beck’s original Tube map, via Transport for London.

My own condensed, relational map began with an extremely primitive line drawing. Then I realised that rather than using my Google map, I was actually starting to refer to my own proto-subway map to decide what I wanted to taste next. The subway map started informing the way I tasted wine.

I think this published version just makes some very simple regional and geographical concepts extremely clear to the beginner. And if you know a lot about wine, you might — I think some people have — appreciate the way that I’ve abstracted those concepts.

Edible Geography: Can you give some examples of the kinds of things you can learn from your map that you can’t learn from other wine maps of France?

Gissen: One thing I only learned through making the map was that all the “lines,” with just a few exceptions, follow rivers or coastlines. You would not necessarily understand, by looking at a normal French wine map, the absolute centrality of the rivers, which are the routes that the Greeks and Romans used as they were moving through France and planting vines.

Some of the rivers also connect regions. For example, you can see how the Burgundy and Rhône regions are connected through river systems. Another thing I didn’t know before doing my map, which would be so obvious to someone who knew a lot about wine, is a lot of the South West region’s most famous wines extend along the river that connect it to Bordeaux. The map shows that connection, up the Garonne or the Dordogne into central Bordeaux.

IMAGE: Detail of the key, Metro Wine Map of France, designed by David Gissen.

The map also shows all the grape varietals, in dotted boxes — a key suggestion from my publisher, Steve De Long. Some of them extend over from one region to the other, so you realise that there must be a similar kind of terroir. For example, from Beaujolais into the lower Loire, which is Cote Roannaise, is all planted in Gamay. Then, of course, the mountain ranges and topographical features are all abstracted and those show interesting connections as well.

That said, with typical maps that show the entire territory, you do get a sense of how big each wine region is. Some wine regions are large — Entre Deux Mers, for example. This map doesn’t show you the difference in production. But all maps do different things, and no map shows you everything. This map has annoyed some French wine people because it makes all the wines equal. Normal wine maps contain subtle cues that tell you how fine different areas are, but on this map, Muscadet and Volnay are exactly the same — yet a benchmark Volnay costs $120 and a benchmark Muscadet is $15.

Nonetheless, although this map is just sort of fun, you can also learn a lot about wine from it. But I don’t even care if people use it that way — what I love about it is that it pulls wine into the language of cities and urban life.

Edible Geography: Why was it important to you to create an artifact that re-framed wine using an urban aesthetic?

Gissen: My experience of Marcel Lapierre’s Morgon was in an urban restaurant. Almost everybody I’ve spoken to who is interested in wine underwent their conversion in an urban wine bar, at an urban restaurant, or with wine purchased at an urban store. Our experience of wine is really an urban one — I think that may well be historically true as well, back as far as the Greeks and Romans founding towns and then planting grapes around them. And yet the first thing that most people who love wine do in order to learn more about wine is run out into the vineyard.

I’m interested in going the opposite route, and digging deeper into the urban experience of wine. I feel as though there are so few objects or visual material that currently express that. Wine is completely overridden with a pastoral aesthetic — and by that I also mean images of the labour of one class for the enjoyment of a generally wealthier class. That type of pastoral imagery makes up ninety-nine percent of the visual culture of wine, whether you’re talking about the coolest, hippest importer’s website or the cheesiest corporate wine outfit. The urban sense of wine has yet to receive a visual language.

IMAGE: The pervasive romantic, pastoral imagery associated with French wine (this example via).

Edible Geography: With the idea being that if you use a different visual language, then you open up the relationship between wine and its environment for renegotiation…

Gissen: Exactly. What’s curious is that beer or liquor has almost no pastoralist imagery associated with it. It’s an agricultural product, like wine; it’s brewed or vinted, like wine; so why is the visual culture of beer or liquor dominated by the language of urbanism and the city, while wine imagery is bucolic?

I’m already thinking about my next wine artifact. It’s still an idea, but I’m interested in perhaps making a concrete decanter. Hardcore wine nerds are really into the effects that concrete vinification has on wine, and the taste that concrete imparts into wine. There’s an irony here that I’d like people to think about more, which is that concrete, which is obviously a material of urban origin, is being embraced by the wine world because it imparts such interesting “natural” flavours into wine.

IMAGE: Concrete wine eggs, via.

Edible Geography: Excuse my ignorance, but what on earth is concrete vinification?

Gissen: A lot of the wines that I’m interested in have typically been fermented in large wooden vats called foudres. Winemakers are increasingly experimenting with new materials in which to ferment the grapes in, particularly for the longer fermentations, and one of those materials is concrete. It’s already used in some French wines, and there’s a group of vintners called the Natural Selection Theory in Australia who all make wine in these concrete-structure eggs. The resulting wines have really interesting flavours — it’s difficult to describe, but they taste very sharp, and somehow extremely natural.

Edible Geography: Is the concrete made to a special recipe or with local rocks and water, or is it just construction industry standard?

Gissen: I have no idea. What is food-grade concrete? It’s bizarre.

The other idea that’s behind the concrete decanter concept is to consider the way wine glass design is so dominated by Riedel. You probably know the glass series I mean — there’s a balloon shape for Bordeaux or Burgundy, and a more narrow shape for Chardonnay, and so on. They revolutionised wine drinking and have been widely copied.

I appreciate drinking wine out of them, but I do wonder: Is the wine glass as a project now over? Because one of the things I think that Riedel has unintentionally fostered is an idea that wine is just data — it’s just bouquet and colour and finish and mouthfeel, and the other data points that professional wine tasters are looking at when they’re evaluating wine. But just because a professional taster is interested in those things doesn’t mean that the other ninety-nine percent of humanity that drinks wine out of a glass has to have the Riedel data-fication experience.

I guess I’m interested in objects that will enable us to taste wine in a way that enables other experiences besides pastoralism or data.

IMAGE: Riedel’s varietal-specific glasses.

Edible Geography: When you are drinking wine, what would you say you are experiencing?

Gissen: It totally depends. When I’m in a restaurant and I’m drinking wine, I actually try not to think about it, because it becomes all-consuming. When I’m at home, I try to taste through a territory. I’ll get three bottles from a particular region but perhaps different soil types, I taste them, and I try not to get too pretentious about it. My tasting notes are completely comparative — they’re about differences and similarities to other wines, rather than things such as finish and mouthfeel.

Edible Geography: I know this started as a hobby, but how does thinking about the relational geography of wine fit with your other work re-articulating the relationship between buildings, cities, and overlooked forms of nature?

Gissen: First of all, when I hang out with wine people, the only thing that’s critical to them is what kind of wine I’m interested in, and I love that complete lack of professional obligation on my part.

On the other hand, during a lecture I gave this spring in Australia, I was talking about an architect whose work you and I both love, Philippe Rahm. I was discussing his design for underground houses that would bring up the air of the earth, and the way in which he described the house as having a terroir — a brownish taste of the earth that the people who lived there would be able to sense in their noses and minds.

Afterward, my wife came up to me and said, “Oh my god, your wine thing is not a hobby. It’s part of the same thing!” Wine is just an excuse to get all that funky shit in my mouth — all the dirt I love. My appreciation of wine is so completely subnatural that now when we go out to restaurants, I can never do the ordering. I love these dirty, filthy wines, and my non-wine friends would be completely repulsed.

IMAGE: Underground Houses, Philippe Rahm.

Edible Geography: I wanted to return to the idea of terroir, which is a hotly contested word. I think that you are perhaps on the side of people who think that terroir has a lot to do with a cultural relationship to the land, as opposed to being purely an expression of meteorological or a geological phenomena.

Gissen: I get into so many arguments with people about this on Twitter, because they say terroir is nature and I find that absurd. After all, someone chose to plant grapes somewhere or chose to brew something somewhere. I think Philippe Rahm’s way of thinking about terroir is much more interesting — it’s less rooted in the thing and more rooted in the mind of the person experiencing it. In his underground houses, the idea of terroir involves provoking the ground in some way — provoking something out it for the experience of the inhabitant of the house. In other words, terroir is not something that’s necessarily innately perceptible. It’s produced through human — in that case, architectural — intervention.

Of course, terroir is still something specific, even if it is produced by humans. I went to a screening and lecture by a guy who is really into wine, and he said two sentences about terroir and beer that completely fascinated me. He said that because of the nature of the brewing process — the way that the yeast and the hops are mashed and so forth — it’s very hard to have a sense of place in beer, but that the Trappists deliberately use open-vat fermentation so that insects, bacteria, and lady bugs, in particular, can get into the vats and give the beer a sense of where it came from.

In that case, terroir doesn’t come from the ground, so it lacks that whole romantic notion. It’s produced from spores in the air, which I find fascinating.

IMAGE: Flying Fish Exit 11, an American Wheat ale designed to refresh those leaving the Turnpike at Exit 11 to head to the Jersey Shore,via the Scranton Examiner.

Edible Geography: Speaking of beer, the taste of place, and a lack of land-based sentimentality, there’s a brewery called Flying Fish that’s creating a beer for each exit on the New Jersey Turnpike.

Gissen: That’s awesome.

Edible Geography: It’s part gimmick, but it’s actually pretty interesting, and the exits I’ve tried taste great. In this case, I suppose, the Turnpike is like the rivers of France. While we’re on the topic of the relationship between terroir and the built environment, I notice that you’ve included architectural landmarks on your map — why?

Gissen: The story behind that is that my publisher sent me a link to different subway maps from all over the world. I looked at them all really carefully, and there was one of Prague’s subway system that used cartoons of buildings and different landmarks to describe the different areas of the city.

I loved that idea, so I borrowed it. First of all, it changes the view: with the subway map, it always seems as though you’re looking down, but with the addition of these elevations, you’re now getting two different perspectives blended on the one map.

Then, because all the buildings I chose are from different periods, there’s also this great sense of movement and travel and time — you realize that you’re looking at a place that has a history.

And, of course, there’s also the urban reference. I only included one château, and I refused to include any farmhouses. The Unité’s on there, Richard Rogers’ Tribunal de Grand Instance, Carcassonne, a cathedral — I mean, how many wine maps have a socialist housing project on them?

IMAGE: A Prague subway map, via

Edible Geography: That may well be a first! So, where would you recommend someone to start their own journey through the wines of France?

Gissen: Start with the Loire, going west to east. The thing about wine is that it’s so crazy expensive, and for most regions you need to go in with people to get stuff, but the Loire is cheap. For $10 you can try an interesting Muscadet, and because it’s right there next to the ocean there’s this intense salinity. I’ve never had a Muscadet that doesn’t have a salty flavour. Move toward the center with the Chenin Blancs, which are very stony. Most of the wines in the centre are made the same grape — Cabernet Franc — so you can notice subtle and interesting variations in the taste of wines from different areas. And then if you move all the way over toward Sancerre and Pouilly Fume, the soils return again to prehistoric ocean, so you start getting flinty, salty tastes again. It’s amazing.

Meanwhile, if you detour toward the northerly Chenin Blanc appellations, like Jasnières, you can experience altitude too. They’re grown at a slightly higher elevation, so they have unusual flavourrs. The Coteaux du Loir is a really bizarre wine: the two that I’ve had taste like sweetcorn.
And with the exception of Sancerre, you can try a good example of everything in the Loire for $12 or $15.

Edible Geography: What happens after France? Will you explore new wine territories?

Gissen: I don’t know. I do feel as though there’s something that really interests me in re-contextualising wine as urban. At the end of the day, though, the map is fun. It’s something to enjoy visually and to help map out a plan for drinking some interesting stuff. And it helps keep my life weird.

IMAGE: Foodprint NYC was generously hosted by Studio-X NYC, back in February 2010. Photo by Rachel Hillery, Columbia GSAPP.

As you can perhaps imagine, this is a pretty exciting opportunity. Studio-X NYC, like its partner Studio-X sites in Rio de Janeiro, Beijing, Moscow, and Mumbai, is intended to be a Swiss Army knife sort of space, reconfiguring to host design workshops, research initiatives, and editorial meetings as comfortably as public exhibitions and events. Each Studio-X location is also imagined as an octopus-like central nervous system, extending its tentacles out into the city and beyond, through everything from tours to blog posts.

IMAGE: Studio-X NYC reformatted, from The Studio-X Guide to Liberating New Forms of Conversation, edited by Gavin Browning.

IMAGE: Studio-X NYC reformatted, from The Studio-X Guide to Liberating New Forms of Conversation, edited by Gavin Browning.

The cumulative goal of each tweet, event, and smell mapping expedition is to generate new perspectives, new insights, and new ideas into the future of the city — to bring together people of diverse disciplines and backgrounds, to experiment with different formats for conversation and engagement, and to develop cautionary, hopeful, and, above all, thought-provoking future scenarios.

Geoff and I are already planning a whole array of events, exhibitions, lectures, tours, podcasts, videos, booklets, maps, night schools, film festivals, design workshops, sound walks, municipal water tastings, dinners, drinks, interview marathons, concerts, interventions, parties, emergency drills, and collaborations, including several with the GSAPP’s own stellar faculty — many of which, I hope, might be of interest to Edible Geography readers.

IMAGE: Studio-X NYC reformatted, from The Studio-X Guide to Liberating New Forms of Conversation, edited by Gavin Browning.

Of course, I will also continue to post here (with more frequency, once this transcontinental move is over), co-direct Foodprint Project events and projects with Sarah Rich (mark your calendars for Foodprint LA on November 5), and co-curate my forthcoming exhibition on the refrigerated spaces of North America with the Center for Land Use Interpretation (of which, more shortly — we just received a generous grant from the Graham Foundation to support our work!).

As we get up and running, you can keep up-to-date with Studio-X NYC’s goings-on via Twitter and email. For now, though, I’d like to invite those of you in New York to our first week of events!

IMAGE: Community data gathered as part of Building a Healthy Boyle Heights initiative (participatory sensing project conceived by Deborah Estrin).

LI@SX (I): Deborah Estrin
Thursday, September 1
12:30 – 1:15pm, Studio-X NYC [map]

This Thursday, we’re hosting the first in our live interview series (Live Interviews at Studio-X, or LI@SX), in which we borrow interesting people for an informal conversation in front of whoever can come, and record, transcribe, and (technology permitting) livestream it for those who can’t. Our first volunteer (victim?) is Deborah Estrin, Professor of Computer Science at UCLA, and co-director of a new non-profit, openmhealth.org.

In 2003, Estrin was named one of Popular Science magazine’s “Brilliant 10″ for her work on embedded sensor networks. Meanwhile, Foodprint Project fans may recognise her name as one of the main forces behind our exciting new project: creating a crowd-sourced map of Los Angeles’ food consumption patterns.

At 12:30pm on Thursday, we’ll be grabbing a sandwich together and talking about her new work on participatory sensing, citizen science, and community data gathering, in the context of the city. If you’re around, we’d love for you to bring a brown-bag lunch and join us.

IMAGE: Liam Young installing his Specimens of Unnatural History at the Nevada Museum of Art. Photo by Jamie Kingman.

Landscape Futures Night School with guest Liam Young
Thursday, September 1
6:00 – 8:00pm, Studio-X NYC [map]

As if our lunchtime interview with Deborah Estrin was not enough intellectual stimulation for the day, we’re also hosting the first in our “Night School” series on Thursday evening. Liam Young, co-founder of futures think tank Tomorrows Thoughts Today and leader of the Unknown Fields Division nomadic design studio (newly returned from a summer expedition to Chernobyl and Baikonur), will be joining us to introduce some of his Specimens of Unnatural History, recently installed as part of curator Geoff Manaugh’s Landscape Futures exhibition at the Nevada Museum of Art.

Following on from that, Liam and Geoff will be leading an interactive conversation, whiteboard brainstorm, and armchair journey around the world, exploring fieldwork as a form of research toward site-specific responses. Expect to discuss everything from Australian kangaroo culls and invasive species bio-control to conflict metals and boat rentals in the Congo, as a springboard to generate alternative scenarios and explore their spatial implications.

IMAGE: Cover of Geologic City, by Smudge Studio.

Geologic City Book Launch and Exhibition with Smudge Studio, Kevin Allen, and Meg Studer
Thursday, September 8 — Thursday, September 22
Launch: Thursday, September 8, from 6:00 — 8:00pm, Studio-X NYC [map]

Join us at this launch party for artists’ Jamie Kruse and Elizabeth Ellsworth of Smudge Studio’s new publication, Geologic City: A Field Guide to the GeoArchitecture of New York. In addition to the opportunity to purchase this invaluable pamphlet, which will take you to twenty urban sites and equip you with the tools to detect their geologic history, Kruse and Ellsworth will also guide you through an interactive installation based on their guide.

Alongside their work will be that of two of their collaborators, Kevin T. Allen and Meg Studer, who will offer you the chance to listen to New York’s geology as experienced by the Brooklyn Bridge, and to trace the temporal and geographic trajectory of one of the city’s most ubiquitous imported geologies: road salt.

IMAGE: Salt map, by Meg Studer.

***All events are free, open to the public, and take place at 180 Varick St, Suite 1610, New York. Unfortunately, at least for the time being, we require an RSVP to studioxnyc AT gmail DOT com.***

If you can come to any or all of the above, we’d love to see you. As I mentioned before, if you’d like to stay up-to-date with Studio-X NYC, join our email list and follow us on Twitter. If not, pardon the interruption, and please stick around for a return to regularly scheduled programming on Edible Geography…

Nestled between an interview with the 11th Earl of Sandwich (the 4th Earl is credited with popularising the consumption of meat between bread) and a meditation on why Thom Yorke would wait with a pack of sandwiches as well as a gun in the Radiohead song, “Talk Show Host,” is an essay by architect Nicholas de Monchaux, whose recent book, Spacesuit, is one of the best things I’ve read this year.

IMAGE: Palladio’s Villa Rotonda in section, via.

IMAGE: Palladio’s Villa Rotonda in section.

In his essay, de Monchaux discusses art historian Rudolf Wittkower’s suggestion that the idealised proportions of Renaissance buildings such as Palladio’s Villa Rotonda can only be understood through the section — a vertical cut that “reveals a precisely perfected layering of space and substance that was contained by what might seem to have been an overwhelming or inscrutable façade.” Drawing on philosopher Mircea Eliade’s The Sacred and the Profane, de Monchaux then suggests that while plan view is inherently mundane and grounded (from planum, or the bottom of the foot), the section reveals the divine harmony of vertical space.

IMAGE: Egg salad and turkey avocado BLT sandwiches from Pret A Manger, photo by my favourite chroniclers of lunch, Front Studio.

Extrapolating from Renaissance churches to the shelves of Pret A Manger, de Monchaux suggests that the “secret truth of the sandwich is revealed on its sectioning”:

[Leon Battista] Alberti’s reflection on perfect proportion in building equally applies to the perfect sandwich, which will “awake sublime sensations … in such a way that every part has its absolutely fixed size … and nothing could be added or taken away without destroying the harmony of the whole.”

“And,” de Monchaux concludes, “it is only through the cut that this mystery is revealed.”

IMAGE: A scanned Lion bar, invented by Allan Norman for Rowntree’s, and first introduced in 1977, in Dorset, image via Scandybars.

Food photography is having a cross-sectional moment. From graphic designer Jon Chonko’s scanwiches — sandwiches, cut in half and scanned for “education and delight” — to Nathan Myrhvold’s hi-tech cutaways, we are increasingly able to appreciate the internal architecture of our culinary creations from a perspective that has traditionally only been available to lasagna, cake, terrines, and other foods served in slice format.

IMAGE: A Subway Cold Cut Combo, via Scanwiches.

IMAGE: Nathan Myhrvold’s barbecue cutaway. Photo by Ryan Matthew Smith, via The Smithsonian.

Yesterday, Grub Street New York drew our attention to Scandybars, which has been scanning its way through the global chocolate bar canon since June. The resulting images are gorgeous — fully deserving of the term “eye-candy” — but they also offer a fascinating insight into the design vocabulary available to a chocolate bar inventor.

IMAGE: A scanned 100 Grand bar, via Scandybars.

IMAGE: A scanned Baby Ruth bar, via Scandybars.

As is the case with biscuit-embossers, the names of the men and women responsible for inventing the world’s most iconic chocolate bars are, for the most part, lost to history. And, like their biscuit-based colleagues, chocolate bar designers work with a limited repertoire of ingredients (nuts, crisped rice, chocolate, biscuit, coconut, nougat, and caramel), manipulated through technological innovation (enrobing, extruding, and moulding machines), to develop a wonderful variety of creamy, crunchy, tongue-coating creations.

Sometimes the design challenge is practical, as the Twix cross-section below allows us to appreciate. The thin layer of chocolate between the shortbread finger and the caramel topping acts as architectural insulation, preventing water migrating from the caramel into the shortbread and softening it.

IMAGE: A scanned Twix bar, via Scandybars.

The Baby Ruth and 100 Grand bars demonstrate variations on the idea of a crispy/crunchy exterior surrounding a smooth interior, while the Oh Henry! and Snickers bars, below, mix nuts with caramel above a smoother, denser layer of fudge or nougat, with the whole ensemble enrobed in a thin chocolate coating. The Lion bar (shown at the start of the post) combines both approaches, embedding a filled Kit-Kat-style wafer inside a 100 Grand exterior, turducken-style.

IMAGE: A scanned Oh Henry! bar, via Scandybars.

IMAGE: A scanned Snickers bar, via Scandybars.

Mouth-feel, texture, taste, and even shareability are among the aspects of consumer experience that can be engineered through permutations of the basic chocolate bar template. The snap-off wafers of a Kit-Kat encourage more leisurely, social consumption, for example, while the interior chewiness of a Snickers creates a perception of satisfaction that the exterior crunch of a 100 Grand bar could never match.

As Nathan Myrhvold explains in his TED talk on the subject, the cutaway image is a powerful way to “communicate science, technique, and wonder.” A cross-section encourages viewers to admire the science and technology of food, even — or perhaps especially — when it reveals imperfections in the industrial process, as in the Kit-Kat slip fault below.

IMAGE: A scanned four-bar Kit-Kat, via Scandybars.

The scanned chocolate bar or cutaway barbecue photo, in other words, foregrounds aspects of our food that we may not have considered before. It allows us to re-imagine cuisine as a highly-engineered expression of food, and to appreciate the scientific and creative innovation that brings us everything from perfectly charred burgers to the ever-crumbly Twix biscuit base.

A few months ago, I talked to industrial designer Marcelo Coelho, whose prototype 3D candy printer is bringing chocolate bar design into the home kitchen. As he pointed out,  you can already find chocolate bars at the grocery store that are made using industrial-scale versions of his extruding device.

IMAGE: Marcelo Coelho’s prototype 3D candy printer.

The revolutionary aspect of Coelho’s 3D printer, of Myrhvold’s Modernist Cuisine, and of molecular gastronomy in general is that chefs and amateurs alike are increasingly finding ways to re-create those factory technologies and tools at an individual scale. Just as desktop publishing software and on-demand printing have enabled almost anyone to produce a book, Coelho’s 3D printer would give home cooks the tools to design their own chocolate bar. The cross-sectional food photo is both inspiration for and symptom of this movement to re-imagine processed food as something that consumers can examine, understand, and ultimately re-design.

In other words, we are all food technologists now.